New Red Order

A couple weeks ago, I (Devika) visited the Artists Space gallery in downtown Manhattan to check out the ongoing exhibit, "Feel at Home Here," by New Red Order—a “public secret society” with rotating members who creates exhibitions, videos, and performances that question and re-channel our relationships to indigeneity. As I walked into the gallery, the lobby welcomed me with an assortment of marketing paraphernalia: a poster advertised “Savage Philosophy™”; a red landline invited me to call a hotline; and a screen played a video of a white man exhorting me to “never settle” and to realize my "fullest potential” by joining his organization, New Red Order.  Was this the merchandise section of the gallery? A marketing or recruitment video? Or a parody? I couldn’t quite tell at first. This slippage between satire and fact, which constantly reminds us of the all-too-real absurdity of the settler colonial project, is the modus operandi of New Red Order. As I walked further into the exhibit, one wall featured a sardonic timeline of the history of the Improved Order of Red Men, a whites-only political society that New Red Order riffs on subversively. One section of the room was modeled as a real-estate office for “Giving Back™" land. And the centerpiece featured a rotating video installation, which included New Red Order’s ongoing feature-film-slash-recruitment-campaign, Never Settle. To dig into the exhibit’s provocative plays with time, futurity, guilt, ownership, and desire, I spoke to New Red Order’s “core contributors," as they describe themselves: Jackson Polys, Adam Khalil, and Zack Khalil. Today’s podcast presents a short excerpt of our conversation, featuring Adam and Jackson, but look out for the full interview in the Film Comment Letter on Thursday, June 24. For show notes, go filmcomment.com/blog/the-film-comment-podcast-new-red-order